In the context of a service-oriented architecture, a service provides software functionality in such a way that disparate systems are interoperable. The software functionality provided by a service often encompasses business logic. For each service, there will be at least one service provider and any number of service clients configured to communicate with the service provider(s). When the service provider(s) are overloaded with service requests, the service clients may experience diminished performance for many of their pending service requests.